A new poster from the School of Emergent Priorities and the School of Continuous Improvement audits nine shared-kitchen clear-outs against Facilities' monthly labelling-compliance figure, and finds no relationship between the two.
An unannounced ten-week audit across nine shared kitchens finds discarded food volume moves independently of the compliance percentage Facilities reports each month
A percentage can climb for ten straight weeks and still describe nothing about what left the fridge. A new poster from the School of Emergent Priorities and the School of Continuous Improvement adds the finding to the University’s research repository.
Facilities’ shared-kitchen fridges run on a familiar rule: unlabelled items get a coloured compliance sticker and, after 48 hours, the bin. Facilities reports the share correctly labelled each month as evidence the scheme works, a figure nobody had checked against what a clear-out discards until Dr Petra Umbile and Dr Mirela Hanke did.
Across nine shared kitchens over ten unannounced weeks, the pair weighed every item binned under the clear-out rule and matched it, kitchen by kitchen, against Facilities’ reported compliance figure. Compliance climbed steadily across the audit; discarded weight did not move with it.
A compliance figure and a waste figure can sit beautifully together in the same monthly pack without either one telling you anything true about the other. Ours don’t, and now we can say so.
— Dr Petra Umbile, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Emergent Priorities
Dr Mirela Hanke, the poster’s second author, said the surprise wasn’t that the figures moved apart. “It’s that nobody had put them in the same room to check,” she said.
This term’s repository gets an unusual addition: a comparison that came back clean. Associate Professor Casimir Beng, of the Adaptive Metrics Lab, said the result matches a pattern his own work keeps finding: “A figure only proves itself once someone checks it against the thing it’s meant to track, and most of ours never get that far.”
Facilities’ monthly report publishes the figure without the caveat.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.10ryca.